14 June 2008 - Clad in Iron : Union Monitors v the Royal Navy

Meetings › 14 June 2008 - Clad in Iron : Union Monitors v the Royal Navy

Speaker: Howard J. Fuller

By 1863 the influential Controller of the Royal Navy declared that naval intervention in the American Civil War was all but 'impossible'.  Tempting strategic targets along the American coastline, such as New York City, were no longer vulnerable to sudden attacks by British flotillas.  New fortifications, harbour obstructions, mines and a rapidly growing force of Union ironclads--especially the monitors--threatened to upset what historian Kenneth Bourne has termed the "Balance of Power in North America".  Canada could not be defended on land from the Americans by the classic threat of Britain counter-attacking from the sea.  As Sir Thomas Brassey declared in 1882, monitors were "par excellence, the best type of vessel for...naval warfare on the coast."  This paper will examine exactly why monitors were the chosen first-line of national defence over other Union ironclads, and how they presented a Brown Water riddle for the world's greatest Blue Water empire.  Today even the term 'ironclad' is split between two pre-eminent examples: HMS Warrior (now restored at Portsmouth) and the original USS Monitor (subject of a $30 million museum in Hampton Roads, Virginia).  Some 150 years later, the Atlantic Ocean continues to divide these two specimens of naval architecture as historical representations of the limits of national power, American and British, the Turtle and the Shark. 

Intervention in the Civil War may not have been impossible.  But it would require a national commitment to imperial defence that many mid-Victorians already questioned; a price tag already inflated by the costs of the Crimean War and a naval arms race with France.  In the meantime it was touch-and-go, North and South, in America.  The 'High Tide' of the Confederacy might float the Warrior into New York after all.  What emerges in this analysis is more than just guns vs. armour, turret vs. broadside, but grand political and strategic imperatives from both the White House and Downing Street—affected by radical technologies and affecting them in turn.

The 2002-3 Fellow in U.S. Naval History through the U.S. Naval Historical Center in Washington, D.C., Howard J. Fuller completed his doctoral thesis through King's College London's prestigious Department of War Studies. His areas of speciality include the American Civil War, the British Empire and naval warfare of the 19th-century. Dr. Fuller is currently Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the University of Wolverhampton (UK), and teaches additional history courses online for University of Maryland University College. He is a frequent contributor to conferences and journals on both sides of the Atlantic, Associate Editor for the International Journal of Naval History, and has recently published Clad in Iron: The American Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power for Praeger International/Greenwood Press.  He is currently editing 'Twixt Sea & Shore: Issues of Coastal Assault & Defence During the Pax Britannica for University Press of Florida, and perhaps naively hopes to publish Technology and the Mid-Victorian Royal Navy: Ironclads and Naval Innovation  for Routledge Press late next year.

Please note the meeting times for this event at the Civil Service Club are 1.00pm to 4.30 pm.

Take advantage of our new Venue to meet in the bar of the Civil Service Club prior to the event

The venue: (click here for link to location, taken form website - opens in new window)

The Civil Service Club is situated in Great Scotland Yard, near Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross railway station, Charing Cross Underground Station (Northern and Bakerloo lines), Embankment Underground Station (Circle and District, Northern and Bakerloo lines).

The Club is within easy walking distance from Government Offices on Whitehall and a short journey by bus or underground from the Government Offices along Victoria Street, Lambeth Bridge and near to Victoria Station.

‹ Back to Meetings